Reeva: A Mother's Story (8 page)

It was a very happy time. She had a wonderful, free childhood playing with friends and roaming around the stables, always at the heart of what was going on in our lives. She went to fancy-dress parties. I made her up like a little angel, with wings and rosy cheeks and lipstick and glitter. We always had a party for her birthday. And every Christmas, Barry would dress up as Father Christmas for all the children at Burliegh. She would never ask Santa for dolls and Barbies, she would ask for a garage for her car collection. She wasn’t girly, more of an outdoorsy tomboy. She was always mad about cars. Year later, when she was being officially introduced by
FHM
as a new cover girl, I laughed when I read the accompanying interview. She’d said, ‘People assume I’m of the princess variety. But the only Barbie I owned growing up was one that came with a horse. Needless to say, Barbie was burnt at the stake by my Lego men. I only ever had guy mates growing up – and I’m grateful for it!’

She displayed a nurturing nature from an early age. Kim, who is eleven years older than Reeva, reminded me of the occasion when she’d been rude to me and her parents, Michael and Lyn, drove her over to Burliegh to apologise. ‘I sat in the car distraught,’ recalls Kim. ‘And little Reeva came out and said, “Don’t worry, Kimmy, it will be fine.” It was amazing – a five-year-old consoling a brat of a sixteen-year-old teenager who had come to apologise to Aunty June!’

When she was eight, we took her to church to be baptised. My parents had instilled their Protestant faith in me and I wanted her to grow up a strong Christian. Barry, too; he has always read his bible. It was such a big thing for her. When the minister, following the traditional set service, asked her: Do you believe in God? Reeva shouted her answers at the top of her voice in case anyone wasn’t listening, ‘Yes! OF COURSE I do!’ She was a big personality from the start. She had natural warmth and charisma. We treasure a photo of her holding hands with Barry from that day. She’s dressed for the occasion in a white dress and pale pink jacket, with long white socks and pretty shoes, her long wavy hair tied back. On the back she’s written proudly,
Me and My Dad
.

Her grandparents adored her. They had a special relationship with this little
laat lammetjie
of ours, particularly Barry’s stepfather, Alec Luigi Serra. He was an amazing man, an Italian, and he loved her to bits. They didn’t have much money, her grandparents, but they put money into a Post Office account in her name. They wanted to do that for her. Someone said to me that even though she died early and we only had a short time with her, we all probably got more love from her than some parents and grandparents get in a whole lifetime. She was a strong character. My other daughter is too. Even though we are going through bad times, we can laugh at things, finds ways to be happy and stay strong. I’ve always told my girls that you need a really strong sense of humour in life.

In 1991 we uprooted from Cape Town to Port Elizabeth to ensure Barry had work. It’s difficult to make ends meet in the horsey world, let alone make money. We always struggled financially, Barry and I. We always had to muddle through. When you run a large livery stable, you have to feed the horses in your care and pay your grooms to help muck out and exercise them, but often owners don’t meet their bills. You can’t stop feeding and looking after the animals just because their owners don’t settle their bills on time, or pay up at all in some cases. We had a lot of problems with that. People just didn’t see paying for their horses’ care and keep as a priority; but we needed to live. To make money in horses, you need to breed, and we didn’t have baby horses. So it became tough to keep the Burliegh Equitation Centre running as a going concern for us in Cape Town, although we loved our life there and all our friends. Barry found a niche training horses in Port Elizabeth so we left, heading east along the Indian Ocean coast to PE, a calmer, sleepier city. In fact, Barry went six months in advance, and people thought we might have separated. Finally the three of us moved into accommodation at the Jockey Academy while Barry ran his horses at Arlington racecourse. Before long he had about fifty horses in training and about twenty grooms who lived in lodgings at the racecourse with their women and children and babies, and often quite extended families. Barry and I were used to working together in Cape Town, and I wanted to continue that dynamic with Reeva, of course, in tow, so I set up a spaza shop at the racecourse. For fifteen years I ran the shop, a sort of informal convenience store selling kilos of flour and rice to supply the day-to-day grocery needs for these workers’ families.

When she wasn’t at school, Reeva was often at my side in the spaza shop. One of the old black gentlemen said the other day he remembered her warmth and kindness and her big smile. She grew up with all those mommies and daddies and babies and children. I was friends with all these women as they went about their domestic chores. Every day we’d chat. They would share their family stories with me and also some of the horrendous dramas that they or their loved ones had endured. That made an impression on Reeva and I have no doubt contributed to the way she felt about the treatment of women as she grew up. One of these women had a daughter the same age as Reeva and the two became friends. When the girls were fourteen, Reeva confided to me that this girl was crying because she wanted to go to school like Reeva but her mother was being forced to sell her for R7,000 to an old man – an old man who could have had Aids or anything. It was sickening. This poor black girl cried and cried and said she just wanted to be like Reeva, and that broke Reeva’s heart.

This tale is deeply shocking and I can’t apologise for making it sound like an everyday occurrence because there were
always
stories of people treating their daughters as a possession that they could make money from. When you’re the mother of a daughter of that age yourself, you feel the outrage very deeply. Reeva and I heard it all: a father locking a girl in a room and letting a series of men rape her for money; mothers who were forced to take their young girls to walk the railway line, a well-known area for prostitutes. Reeva took all that on board, all these young girls whose childhood had been brought to an end abruptly and sordidly, who were used by their own parents as a means to bring in money. She is okay, now, that fourteen-year-old girl who just wanted to go to school like Reeva. She went through all that but she met and married someone who cares for her and looks after her.

But that was later.

For Reeva, the most dramatic aspect of moving from Cape Town when she was eight was a change of junior school. I remember taking her to see Sister Anne at St Dominic’s Priory. When Sister bent down and said, ‘Well, Reeva, we’ve got lovely clothes in the second-hand shop for you…’ Reeva started crying. ‘Mommy, tell her I don’t wear other peoples’ clothes.’ That’s how she was! Sister Anne is now a very gentle, frail old lady, but she was quite formidable when Reeva first arrived at St Dominic’s. On one occasion, it was Reeva’s birthday and I’d brought in a cake for her to share with her class, but she decided she’d rather spend the day with me. She just walked out of school and made her way back to our place at Arlington – that’s an hour’s walk through the Bush. One of the teachers was sent to fetch her. Back at school, Sister Anne scolded her: ‘What did you think you were doing? Walking through the Bush? You could’ve been chopped into tiny pieces. Tiny pieces, my girl!’

St Dominic’s is an independent, co-educational Catholic day school and it was very good for Reeva. Founded in 1900, it is situated in beautiful manicured grounds, surrounded by woodland near Walmer, a garden suburb, with lots of playing fields. The school motto,
Veritas
– Truth – is in keeping with the tradition of the original nine Dominican nuns who founded the school to perpetuate the line from Psalm 117: ‘the Truth of the Lord that endures forever’. I was brought up a Protestant, but the Catholic faith was a good grounding for Reeva. St Dominic’s is the sort of school where everybody knows everybody; no one is just a number like at a government school. She thrived in that atmosphere and she stayed there all the way through high school too, as Trinity High School merged with St Dominic’s and shared the premises. It wasn’t cheap. Fees today range from R16,600 per annum for pre school to R39,260 per annum in Grade 12, the final year of high school. There is a new headmaster there now, but the philosophy of personal development and emphasis on charity and helping the underprivileged persists. In the headmaster’s office I noticed on a recent visit a lovely sign on his pinboard about every child being a seed fallen to earth who will germinate and grow and ripen and bear fruit.

In this environment Reeva’s natural human kindness took on a wider dimension. ‘That child didn’t have to be taught Christianity; she had it inside her,’ insists Nombulelo Ntlangu, who taught her Xhosa, one of the official languages of South Africa distinguished by its click consonants:

‘For some people, it’s a new thing, learning to work in this diverse world of cultures, but that child knew how to do it instinctively. She was an old soul. She was so clever, she never saw colour in a person. All our students had to do three languages – English, Xhosa, Afrikaans – but that child never differentiated. She fitted in every group. That fascinated me. She never made a fuss or showed an awareness of colour or wondered why I, her Xhosa teacher, could be a class teacher in the way some other children did. She worked with people across colour – Indian girls, coloured girls, black girls. She was prepared for our new modern world when she was young.’

Today I take great comfort in the way the teachers remember Reeva so clearly as someone who always had a presence. After she’d moved to Johannesburg, whenever she’d fly down to PE to visit us she would wonder how her old teachers were and always tried to pop in to see them. Since her death, they have been generous in sharing their memories of her with me. Oh, I’ve learnt a lot! There was the sister who always referred to Reeva as ‘the mannequin’. And the male teacher who had just got divorced and opened up to his class asking if any of them had a sister his age. Apparently Reeva had shot up her arm and declared, ‘I’ll get you a date with my sister Simone!’ That was her, always willing to help others. The teacher wore a toupée, so poor Simone insisted their date was somewhere nice and quiet.

I’ve had a good laugh with Di Cowie, her games teacher, reminiscing about the time she was asked by Sister Anne to come and fetch Reeva after her doomed birthday walk across the Bush. Di was bowled over years later when, long after Reeva had left school, she was sitting in her car outside the bank and Reeva – back for a visit to PE – strolled over and gave her a hug. ‘As a student, she always greeted you warmly, “Hello, ma’am,” even if she was rushing past you in the passage, and that always brightened my day,’ said Mrs Ntlangu.

St Dominic’s Priory truly celebrated individuality, which was good for a girl who was brought up virtually as an only child. Barry and I had made a conscious decision to send Reeva to a school that made a virtue of this Rainbow Nation of ours. The annual school magazine was full of snippets about the diverse talents of pupils – singing, charity work, sports achievements, engineering projects, you name it. There are lots of photos of Reeva as a finalist in a modelling competition, a semi-finalist in an event sponsored by Liquifruit, being hailed for her ‘unique sense of style’ and ‘fashion flair’. During Operation Charity Week, she led the Grade 9 effort:

‘I personally feel that the grade nines gave it their all to really spice up the festivities. We decided that a Wacky Day would do the thing and it certainly made everyone feel relaxed and comfy in their natural state of mind. (No offence to be taken!) We raised a substantial amount of money and feel great that we helped with a really good cause!’

In 2001, her penultimate year at school, she was Captain of Rosary House with Mark Francis and signed off with an effervescent end-of-year report:

‘Competition among our three houses caused sparks of passion and tremendous spirit to ignite a wildfire of enthusiasm and incredible sportsmanship and commitment among all team members! As Head of Rosary for 2001, we are proud and most definitely confident in saying that our team put up an incredible fight this year and proved that they could certainly work side-by-side and smile, though faced with disappointment and defeat…’

Her maths teach, Selma Lourens, tells me Reeva herself was never aware of her beauty. ‘She was a magnetic personality who lit up a room with her smile and she was just so sincere,’ she said. ‘She was so natural. She never mentioned her modelling success, even though it must have meant a lot to her. When we heard the awful news of her death, a lot of press came to interview those of us who had known and taught her. The students became enthralled by her story and the memories she inspired in all of us. They said, “Ma’am, please when we die, please will you talk about us like that.”’

But there is also a poignant aspect to these conversations. As Mrs Ntlangu said to me, there was always, in amongst that sense of urgency and
carpe diem
philosophy that Reeva displayed, the sense that she somehow knew that her time on Earth might be short. It was perhaps why she felt the need to keep coming back to Port Elizabeth to update her teachers on what she was doing, as though she had some impulse to give it all some permanence and fix herself in the minds of the people she felt had played the greatest part in her life.

Reeva always appreciated what her teachers did for her. She was mature like that. She realised her passage through school was a two-way dynamic. ‘I remember when she brought in a clipping from her first big modelling job,’ Mrs Ntlangu told me. ‘She was still that humble Reeva. She didn’t want praise, she wanted to know how it was at St Dominic’s. You know, sometimes I think people know when their time on Earth is going to be short. Not many kids would come and update us with their activities or careers, but she came to visit us.’

After the events of 14 February 2013, St Dominic’s held a minute’s silence for Reeva at the Past Pupils’ Dinner. For the current pool of young schoolchildren, it was quite an ordeal when the news hit the headlines that South Africa’s squeaky clean superstar role-model athlete had killed his girlfriend – a girl who had once worn the same navy-and-gold-striped uniform blazer as them, who had sat in the same classrooms and prayed in the same chapel. TV vans had taken up a vigil on the road outside the school’s electronic gate; there were cameras on roofs overlooking the private grounds. The school eventually had to say enough is enough, and they asked the press to move on. It was a disturbing intrusion of ‘the real world’ for young, impressionable students. ‘Some of the teachers who’d known her were very distressed,’ Greg Stokell, the headmaster, told me. ‘We held a special assembly to celebrate Reeva’s life and also to introduce to the boys and girls the notion of the harsh reality of life, because that’s what her death represented. No one knows how many days they have and Reeva was a role model in the way she made each day count.’